A data stream (a/k/a stream) may be defined as the communication of data over time. A result stream may be defined as a data stream resulting from a query within a database. Large databases, such as, for example, those used in data warehousing, may be partitioned using range partitioning, list partitioning, hash partitioning, or composite partitioning, for example. A database extract operation may, for example, extract information from a hash partitioned database.
Database extracts to satisfy a query are typically provided as a single stream for the whole query. A single stream for the whole query may severely limit performance of an extract operation and provide limited opportunities for network and throughput scaling. In addition, as a workaround, range queries (i.e., a query over a range of values) may be used to parallelize database extracts. Range queries may result in resource consumption that is a multiple of the number of parallel range queries issued, when the data is hash-partitioned and every disk hosting a partition for the table may have to do work to materialize data for the query regardless of the ranges in use.